Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Ernie, in response to my last entry about fishing at Broomes Island, you instructed me to go find large white perch. With those marching orders, and Gene Mueller's 8-14-08 fishing report, I went to Solomons Island yesterday morning. I took my neighbor Benton Capps who is also a perchoholic. There is something special about white perch. Aside from the fact that they may be the best eating fish we have locally, they supply so much action on light tackle. Well, we found big perch, and they were mixed with redfish. Gene Mueller's article was right on the money. If you see him, please give him a thank you from this old perch jerker. I had not been to Solomons Island since about 1979 when Dr. Roy Sandstrom, his son Dan, and I went there and caught Spotted Seatrout. I had no idea where to go. The guy at the little tackle store started telling me about how they were catching fish in fifteen feet of water at this spot and that spot but that wasn't the the method of fishing I wanted. I wasn't there to bottom bounce, I wanted to use ultra light rods and grubs. Well, The first place I stopped I casted four or five times and BANG, a nine or ten inch perch! Another twenty or so casts and a repeat of the first fish! After repeating this about six or seven times Benton, who is a man of few words, said "Damn, there aren't any small fish here." About that time he hooked a sixteen inch redfish which proceeded to cross the Patuxent River a couple if times before we boated it. The legal size for redfish is eighteen inches. Although we caught about six or eight redfish, we never caught a legal size fish. I had to change my cast and retrieve style drastically in order to catch fish; and that was a little difficult. At the Wicomico River we always cast and begin to retrieve immediately. Ernie, I have heard you describe it as "feeling the bottom" on the retrieve. Well, yesterday I found that I had to fish a deeper shoreline in order to catch fish. Instead of one to two feet of water my sucess was in four to probably six feet of water. I would cast and watch the line until it went slack. I would then begin a very slow retrieve while trying to keep touch with the bottom. To sum it up, we launched at 6:15AM and came out at about 11:00AM. We caught white perch, one flounder, redfish, one small seatroat, one very small rockfish and a bunch of very small bluefish ( six inches).  One word of warning---some jerk yelled at me for getting too close to government property.